Jesse Chen, Founding Engineer

Jesse Chen

✨ Founding Engineer ✨

We're very excited for Jesse Chen to be joining Pylon as a founding engineer after nearly 5.5 years at Samsara. At Samsara, Jesse was a founding engineer of the Safety product line (today doing over 300M in revenue) and was responsible for setting up a LOT of the company’s backend infrastructure.

Jesse will be bringing incredible velocity (previously being the #1 contributor at Samsara) and infra experience to help make everyone at Pylon move faster and build features more easily.

Why did you join Pylon?

After talking to the founders and VCs multiple times, I realized that there’s a clear market need for what we are building. Due to COVID, there was a sudden shift of B2B business operations moving from email to chat platforms like Slack. These platforms are traditionally built for internal company communications, but for the sake of centralization, communication with customers over chat is becoming the standard. There’s a clear gap in tooling to bridge this new chat-first world with existing systems. With Pylon’s rich integrations and a well-timed tailwind of generative AI, Pylon is poised to implement a great solution.

Working with an excellent founding team is equally as important to me as having a compelling product. I’ve worked with Alex and Advith before at Samsara and spent time getting to know Marty and Robert. It’s clear to me that everyone is talented. They all bring different skillsets to the company, and most importantly, they are great people.

I’m especially excited to work in a fast-paced environment with tight feedback loops, build infrastructure from the ground up, cultivate a great engineering culture, and make a lot of great memories with the team.

What software engineering trends are you most excited about?

I’ve been having a blast reading about the latest development practices!

Having worked on a Developer Experience team for the past few years, Airplane.dev jumps out to me as an ingenious take on the age-old problem of building internal tools. It’s “developer-first” platform with a good blend of no-code when you need it. We’ve already started using it at Pylon to power our crons and for ad-hoc data queries.

Another development that I think is great is using general purpose languages to express your infrastructure as code. Pulumi and CDKTF look like great options, and I’m excited to figure out what makes sense for Pylon!

I hear you have some pets! Tell us about them.

I’ve got two orange tabbies named Miso and Momo. I adopted both of them when they were kittens! Ever since I was a kid, I always loved animals, so I adopted Miso soon after I graduated college, and I got Momo during the lockdown.